Chainsaw Man Episode 1 Review: Tatsuki Fujimoto’s Chainsaw Devil Comes to Life! The Mappa Anime Starts With A Bang
Cast: Kikunosuke Toya (voice), Shiori Izawa (voice), Tomori Kusunoki (voice)
Director: Ryu Nakayama
Streaming Platform: Crunchyroll
Filmyhype.com Ratings: 4/5 (four stars) [yasr_overall_rating size=”large”]
Finally, the Chainsaw Man anime has arrived on Crunchyroll. The autumn season promises to be full of quality products on the anime side and between the sixth season of My Hero Academia, the adaptation of the last arc of Bleach and the interesting outsider Blue Lock, the animated series starring the chainsaw man is probably the most awaited given the important expectations raised around its realization. The enormous curiosity about the outcome of the difficult work that Studio MAPPA he was called to perform to animate a work as narratively original and out of the box as it is visually peculiar and eccentric, increased the hype for his debut.
Chainsaw Man Episode 1 Review: The Story
The first episode, entitled “Dog and chainsaw”, already eliminates any doubts of a qualitative nature by dissolving the reservations on the technical sector (but the trailers released in recent months had already been indicated in this sense) and, after the successes and appreciation for the adaptations of the Final Season of Attack on Titan and the first season of Jujutsu Kaisen, it has the flavor of reconfirmation for MAPPA. Under the direction of Ryu Nakayama, the studio adapts the first chapter of the manga by Tatsuki Fujimoto with an almost totality.
The episode introduces the characters of Denji and Pochita, the first poor desperate, the second his faithful dog chainsaw. Denji is up to his neck in debt, possesses nothing but an indissoluble friendship with Pochita, becomes the Devil Hunter out of necessity and gives his proceeds to a ruthless yakuza man who follows him. It is a world of devils and diabolical men that are shown in the first episode of Chainsaw Man, an unhealthy place without hope for the protagonist who wallows in desperation and shuns dreams. “Normal” dreams that he finds himself telling Pochta under the roof of a squalid and dilapidated hut, which he tries to pursue despite a sad resignation.
The flashback on the first meeting with Pochita helps to close the episode’s narrative circularly: Denji is still a child when he meets the little chainsaw devil, he has just lost his father and the torturers of the man who committed suicide are not long in coming to ask the boy to repay the debts of the parent. They are the same thugs who manage his assignments from Devil Hunter and who at the end of the episode betray him using (or enslaving) the power of the Zombie Devil. Killed and torn to pieces, Denji relives thanks to Pochita’s sacrifice and, gaining his strength, consumes his revenge. In the end, some Devil Hunters of the Public Security show up at the scene of the carnage. A woman examines Denji, decrees his exceptional nature and convinces him to follow her with the promise of making his dream come true: bread with jam.
Chainsaw Man Episode 1 Review and Analysis
The first episode of Chainsaw Man travels quickly on the tracks of quality, does not derail and surprises on all fronts, slavishly reproducing Fujimoto’s tables but amplifying his taste for cinematic aesthetics thanks to the valuable direction of Ryu Nakayama, careful to make every shot extremely alive and covered with a particular film patina, engaged in the total spectacularization of the action scene and in the use of a direction that inherits the formal codes of cinema.
An incipit that appears decidedly quick and concise, perhaps even excessively fast in the presentation of the protagonist and his faithful friend, on whose relationship he does not linger long enough, to compromise a dramatic moment with high emotional potential which remains partly unexpressed. precisely because of the necessary speeding up of its premise. The relationship between Denji and Pochita occupies a good portion of the episode, but the space reserved for him is still reduced in more general terms of playing time, so much to weaken and dampen the drama of Pochita’s sacrifice.
However, there is room for moments of unexpected sweetness and food for thought: the interactions between Denji and Pochita are tender and adorable (and the pact between the two, almost an anti-pact, is still a pleasant moment) despite the brevity and thoughts of the protagonist provide interesting hints on the thirst for power and the hunger for goals some men. An introductory episode that manages to stand up on its own, thanks to the semi-vertical nature of its narrative and the memorability of Denji’s first transformation.
Little to note on the technical sector of the episode, which bodes well for the next releases and which seems to be treated both on the sound side and on the visual one. The graphic side constitutes the ideal counterpoint for the mood which is both vaguely nostalgic and crazy work. A general search for the realism of the images, for an aesthetic that detaches itself a lot (and cannot fail to do so) from the dirty and deliberately confusing tables of Tatsuki Fujimoto, giving up in part to that chaos with which the manga is deeply impregnated, but still managing to ensure the anime a visual imprint with a strong identity, more imbued with the melancholy that hovers over the story, visually made explicit by the use of cold colors, a desaturated color palette and almost always devoid of strong colors.
Don’t worry, there is still all the splatter to which the manga has accustomed us, between bloodshed and torn and gushing bodies. The CG is not fully convincing, postponed to a further evaluation but still acceptable thanks to the use of a cel shading that well blends the computer graphics with an animation that exploits and wisely uses the shadows to obtain an already mentioned realism that passes through a three-dimensional effect that provides thickness and depth to the graphic aspect of Chainsaw Man.
Mention of merit for the splendid opening of Kinshi Yonezu, Kick Back, directed by the talented Shingo Yamashita(former author, among others, of the initials of My Hero Academia and, above all, Jujutsu Kaisen), which is overcome with a video clip that exudes cinephilia from all pores (on the other hand, Fujimoto has also shown several times to be a great lover of Western cinema), explicitly citing films such as Pulp Fiction, The Hyenas, No Country for Old Men, The Big Lebowski and other films of which he reproduces some scenes and shots. A gem that was proposed by Yamashita, the icing on the cake for a first episode that already does justice to work with a complicated adaptation and that promises great things for the continuation of the anime.
Chainsaw Man Episode 1 Review: The Last Words
Chainsaw Man Episode 1 is a surprising beginning for the anime of MAPPA, an attestation of the skill of the director Ryu Nakayama and the animators of the studio, the first sensational taste of the work of Tatsuki Fujimoto in a sauce visually less chaotic but more melancholic, equally crazy and splatter and ready to give us 12 episodes of pure entertainment, in the hope of maintaining quality on the very high levels just set.
